I love software, especially Microsoft software.

Its my belief that software is used to formalize processes and anything with the notion of laying ground rules is beloved to me. I actually like to work above that notion and I like to think that software, or more precisely networked software, the kind that's possible to deploy over the Internet can make life a heck of a lot easier.

So, there's this fragile credit system that's been messed with time and again and I think that if the Internet has the logic to biometrically authenticate every human user and determine that the person being authenticated cannot be at more than one place at the same time, we can actually build a more credible credit system. This actually has to go into the IP layer of the Internet, into the routing logic and it will have to incorporate GPS, etc.

That's the true power of software that I would like to unleash. On a more commercial level, I'm planning to build a few geographically dispersed datacenters around the planet for hosting an application that I'm going to build. I'll use virtualization at the core of my infrastructure to deploy all software used to host my application so that I have total freedom as far as maintenance goes when it comes to any physical hardware that hosts my OSes. Other than that, virtualization makes higher levels of redundancy available for my infrastructure software like Windows Server OSes, MOSS, BizTalk, SQL Server, etc.

Now, my datacenters are not going to be dynamically expandable as far as physical real estate is concerned and I have to face the reality that no matter how many physical servers I throw in there, there's always going to be need for more. And some of the time, there's going to be hardware failures. Sure, virtualization makes these failures easier to absorb, but I'm thinking about what could be possible if I can run my software on heavier duty mainframes. If I use mainframes, there's just less hardware to maintain. And mainframes can make better use of my datacenter real estate. Unless the PC architecture can accomodate a design that makes a few terabytes of RAM available to my OSes, I think mainframes are the best way to do this.

I remember reading about something called the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) in Windows NT that enabled NT to run on the Intel 386, DEC Alpha and some other CPU that I don't remember. Later on, Windows 2000 Server could run on the Intel/HP Itanium processor. Can Windows Server 2008 with its Hyper-V technology run on IBM mainframes if Microsoft could put some effort into it?

I plan to host a few hundred billion AD objects in my application that I will deploy in my datacenters, if not a trillion or more, and I can use all the virtualized instances of Windows Server that I can deploy in my datacenters. I've known about IBM running multiple instances of Linux on their mainframes since year 2000 - I think, but Linux doesn't have apps like SharePoint and BizTalk, and besides that Bill's a hero of mine for cutting through a lot of the y'know what. And like I've mentioned, I love Microsoft software.

Thanks.

P.S. I don't know the name of this artist, but have a listen to this track called “Leonardo” from Yngwie J. Malmsteen's “Alchemy” album. The closest I can think of is perhaps Ian Gillan or Rob Halford approaching those capabilities, but I don't remember hearing anything by them that fully encapsulates what this artist delivers on that track or on that whole album. I'm a huge fan of Malmsteen's most unique guitar virtuosity and like I said, his vocalists are grossly underrated. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the new album Malmsteen is curently making with Tim “Ripper” Owens. Malmsteen's music has a lot of double bass drumming thrown in, which I love, and of course, there's Malmsteen's own insanely profound riffing and shredded solos.